Author Talks About Indian History, Culture At Berlin Library

BERLIN — Thousands of Native Americans in Connecticut and New England died from disease brought to the New World before the arrival of English colonists in the early 1600s, author, anthropologist and archaeologist Dr. Lucianne Lavin said Tuesday at a lecture on Connecticut's indigenous peoples.

"The estimates are that 77 percent to 90 percent died off by the 1660s, mainly from disease," Lavin told the 100 people who crowded the community room of Berlin-Peck Memorial Library to hear her talk about the people who lived in Connecticut for more than 10,000 years before European explorers arrived. The talk was sponsored by the Berlin Historical Society.

There were 20 distinct tribal societies in Connecticut. Only five are now recognized as tribes, she said, although there are descendants of other tribes living in the state. Berlin was part of a large part of central Connecticut from Durham and East Haddam north toward Hartford that was the homeland of the Wangunks.

Many of the highways in use today follow trails used by the Indians, including Route 7, Route 1 and portions of interstates. Many state place names are Indian names, such as Hockanum and Nayaug.

The Native American societies were complex, sophisticated, attuned to the seasons, land and food sources, with a highly developed spiritual system and inclusive of women in their governments, Lavin said.

"If you get nothing else from me tonight, I hope you learn that the indigenous people had longevity, continuity, complexity, sophistication and adaptability," said Lavin, whose 489-page book "Connecticut's Indigenous Peoples" was published in 2013 by Yale University Press.

"These were not primitive people. They had tailored clothes. We've found very fine bone needles that date back 8,000 years," she said. "They made tools that looked much like European ones but they used stone, bone, antlers, wood."

Tribes believed in a creator and that spirits traveled through the Milky Way after death to join in life with the creator. They believed the path to the creator was guarded by a fierce large dog that sensed bad people and would not let their souls reach the creator, she said.

Connecticut Native Americans traveled as far as the Great Lakes and to the Carolinas for food and materials, acquired the best stones for tools from tribes in Pennsylvania and the Midwest and were very democratic, giving men and women the right to vote and hold positions of authority, something the English colonists did not do, she said.

"There were not provincial people," Lavin said.

She said the plagues that decimated Native Americans in the 1500s and 1600s made it easier for European colonists to establish themselves and push out the remaining Indians. She noted that one Massachusetts officials in the 1630s wrote of Indians struck by plagues – likely smallpox – that "they dye like rotten sheep."

"It is a miracle we have any, any Native American communities here at all," she said.